Matthew Cheney's Public Library

my primary interest here is not to dismantle the institution of marriage. Instead, I use my experiences with and in queer families to present a picture of resistance to the desperate desire of the mainstream lesbian and gay rights movement to adopt a same-sex version of conventional straight marriage for the sake of social recognition, to assimilate to the hegemonic norms that structure these marriages, and to have the audacity to hold this up as the marker of equality for our communities.

'Increasingly, or, perhaps better, consciously, I’ve tried to “erase” in my work (actually from the very beginning) the demarcation between fiction and nonfiction. All literature is a form of lying, and in the hierarchy of such, I view the autobiographer as the biggest liar for claiming to remember everything as it happened, whereas memory has already done its powerful editing. Next in the hierarchy of liars is the biographer, who dares to claim that he can “know” another’s life. The most honest of the hierarchy is the fiction writer, who says in effect, “This is a lie, a fiction, and I’m trying to convince you it’s all true. …”'